Old Polish echoes of the Jesuit mission in England of 1580

Abstract

The article presents Old Polish reactions to the famous Jesuit mission in England of 1580, and thus also the beginnings of formation of the worship of St Edmund Campion in Poland. They are connected with the publication in Krakow (1583) of a translation of Robert Persons account entitled De persecutione Anglicana, but also with the position that the history of Campion’s mission took in the work of Piotr Skarga SJ. The Polish writer, showing a lively interest in what is going on with English Catholics and inspiring political interventions in support of Jesuits imprisoned in England (including his subordinate, the Vilnius professor James Bosgrave), in subsequent editions of his very popular hagiographic collection Żywoty świętych (The Lives of Saints) presented  Przydatek […] o świętych męczennikach (A Supplement […] on Saint Martyrs) that was several times modified, and in it a paragraph O męczennikach w Anglijej (On Martyrs in England). Its basic part was constituted by – starting with the 1585 edition – the story of St Edmund Campion, St Ralph Sherwin and Alexander Briant’s mission and martyrdom, which was a free adaptation of the narration contained in Concertatio Ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia by John Fenn and John Gibson (1583). Skarga's interest in the figure of Campion was also reflected in the Polish translation of Rationes decem (1583) that he made at the request of King Stefan Batory. It may be said that Rationes decem (also published in Latin in 1605) became one of the fundamental apologetic texts in Poland at the early-modern age, and St Edmund Campion, in a sense, became the patron of controversial theology, which would find its confirmation in the 18th century adaptation of Nicholas Sanders and Edward Rishton’s work De origine ac progressu schismatic Anglicani (1748) written by Jan Poszakowski.